by Jim Graham
‘Well surprise me then,’ Petroff replied, losing interest in the details as he scanned another neuralnet message from Williams. ‘I just need an excuse to deport you.’
As Scat left the room and walked across to the accommodation wing, he realised Petroff was right: it would have to be a fight with a doorstop or with a departmental supervisor. It was a crude plan, but there was precious little time to contrive anything more sophisticated. If he made claims about Pierce’s death, it would shake the station to its core, just as Marvin warned it might. It would get bloody, and anyway, it would defeat the object of keeping Petroff sweet. No, he would have to get bolshie and pick a fight. Given the situation, it would be enough to get him deported.
He wondered what he had left behind in his bunk. He doubted he would get the chance to go collect anything afterwards. He would drop a grunt, he would get a zapping, and then they would drag him in for a quick medical. After that, he was sure he would be detained until the V3 took off.
Aside from his graf and a small personal planner, there was a necklace and silver cross, both given to him at his mother’s funeral. They were in his baggage. He carried them everywhere he went, but never wore them. He could not think of anything else. He would carry them into the fight with him and hope the doorstops did not loot it all when they arrested him.
He did not want to risk a zapping, but he could not think of a faster, or a more reliable, way to get deported. He would disconnect the batteries in his personal planner.
It should be ok.
21
45 minutes before the V3’s planned launch, workers started to exit the accommodation rooms. Some wheeled luggage into the common room, others headed upstairs to the observation deck.
The Trevons did not appear particularly upset or angry at being deported. If anything, the deportations were bringing to an end an uncomfortable chapter in their lives. And if things went as they hoped, it was the beginning of something better.
The out-of-system workers looked a little uneasy. They were staying behind and still had contract negotiations to look forward to before mining had any chance of restarting.
Petroff had been unconcerned.
‘The company can afford to be generous; it has cash coming out of its gazoo. I’d rather give these ungrateful sons of bitches a pay rise and extra media concessions than be reliant on the Trevons.’ He then quickly added, ‘For the time being at least, Scat, until this is all over.’
Scat stood to one side, in a quarter of the common room that housed a few pool tables, a comfy couch, a coffee dispenser and a wall mounted media unit. He looked along the wall to the accommodation wing exit, waiting for Security to bring out the supervisors who they had dismissed and then detained within hours of their arrival.
According to Petroff, they were guilty of turning contract disputes into arguments over who was the ultimate power on Prebos – Corporate, Trevon, or Earth. They were political agitators. For now, though, Corporate could only charge them with commercial crimes.
They appeared as Scat reworked his last conversation with Petroff, looking for a way he might have reservations about his sincerity.
The common room fell into silence. Angolena emerged, ahead of an extended husky carrying Pierce’s coffin and an airbed carrying the inert Arnold. Four plasticuffed supervisors and their escort followed them. There were three troopers in the escort, each of them carrying stun guns holstered under their left arms, butts pointing forward.
Scat looked around him. Aside from the escort, a few more troopers stood outside the entrance to Corporate.
Pierce’s body led the procession across the common room towards the cargo bay corridors. There were murmurings of disapproval as the Trevons gathered around it. They glanced hatefully at the security guards.
Scat decided that this was the right time.
He pushed off from the wall and clipped one of the escorts in the back of the knee. They both went down in a slow motion heap, taking two of the detainees with them. Scat scrambled to his knees, leaning on the trooper’s neck. He dug down with his thumb, pushing the windpipe aside for a fraction of a second.
It was enough.
The trooper saw through a mist of red, he bawled, and pulled at his stun as he tried to stand. Scat struggled to smother his arms. He caught glimpses of the detainees pushing and pulling themselves away, leaving them with room to slug it out. Their fellow Trevons waded in to help pull them clear, knocking chairs and tables over, spilling drinks.
Scat saw a brilliant flash of piercing white and then lost sense of his surroundings. He went down in a heap, landing awkwardly on an upturned chair, his body quivering.
Scat was helpless and panicky. He had no control over anything; even his thoughts were chaotic. He was in a spasm, unable to move anything of his own accord.
He felt Angolena place an airbag over his mouth and nose, forcing air into his lungs. Overhead lights flashed by as they wheeled him into the medical centre.
They laid him out on a gurney and zapped him a couple of times to settle his heart rate. Angolena then stuck a needle into his arm and slowly Scat regained some coordination. Angolena looked around and then leaned in.
‘Did you lose consciousness, Scat?’
‘No ... I don’t think so.’
‘Good,’ Angolena said, checking the back of Scat’s neck. ‘It looks like they took it out on you a little—you’ve a couple of nasty electrical burns around the back: here … and here.’ He tapped Scat’s neck alongside each burn and then eased his head back to the pillow. ‘Follow the light for me, will you,’ he said as he swept a pencil light across Scat’s face. He then leaned in, adding: ‘And remember, you’re to be very angry.’
Scat did not catch everything Angolena was saying, only the tail end of it.
‘What?’ But I already am. Why would he tell me that?
It then dawned on him: he was in the medical centre because he was working to a plan. He tried to recall what that plan was.
‘Sure. But it’ll take a minute.’
Then it flooded back: the suicide watch, the phoney request. And Angolena was aware of the plan. Petroff must trust him.
He gripped the gurney for leverage and swung his right fist into Angolena’s face.
It was a good, clean hit.
As Angolena tottered, Scat pulled the leads from his chest, swung his legs around and fell unsteadily to the floor. Behind him, the gurney smashed against the wall with a loud crash. A cabinet fell to the floor shattering glass across the tiles. Patch rushed across the room in a bid to catch Angolena as he crumpled to the floor only to back off when Scat appeared to square-off with him, his eyes wide open, but still unfocused.
Scat mumbled something to himself, slurring his words like a drunk.
‘Farking jumped-up, trigger-happy grunts! Let me get my farking hands on the bastards.’
Still disoriented, Scat staggered across the room, stumbled into the corridor and blundered into two troopers coming the other way. There was another scuffle. He went down, lashing one of them with an open hand and punching the air with the other.
Eventually he was overwhelmed. He felt the guards kneeling on his back, to keep him still. One of the guards plasticuffed him and pronounced him secure. The other then bounced Scat’s face off the aluminium decking. Scat saw more flashing lights. It went dark. Then there was nothing.
22
When Scat came too, he felt someone, or some people, dragging him through the cargo bay to a waiting ground shuttle. Once inside, his escort sat either side of him, holding him upright.
As expected, he did not have time to return to his bunk. His head hurt and his coveralls were wet with blood, but he was regaining control of his body. As his focus returned, he looked down and saw he had pissed himself, either when he was zapped or after receiving the relaxant.
One of the escorts re-cuffed his hands in front of him, as was regulation when travelling through a zero-atmosphere environment, even in
a ground shuttle. It gave him a chance to feel through his left coverall pocket for the personal planner and his necklace and cross. They were still there.
He looked around, not recognising his escorts: neither of them was involved in the earlier two incidents, which was a relief. Perhaps Petroff was making sure that the running confrontation did not make its way onto the V3. That was good of him. A pissed-off escort was the last thing Scat needed right now.
On the opposite side of the shuttle floor, a group of Trevons viewed Scat with curiosity, disgusted by the condition he was in. They looked at the troopers with a mixture of hostility and suspicion, and the troopers stared back, daring them to make a move they did not like.
It was a tense ride, but at least it was quiet.
The ground shuttle powered its way up a steep ramp at the rear of the ship. It levelled out onto a hangar deck crowded with dozens of idle sub-ftl container shuttles.
The V3 was no ordinary vessel. She was huge—even the smaller of its cargo bays was larger than the biggest of the first-generation tankers and because of that, it struggled to achieve escape velocity from worlds of 1/2 Earth Standard Gravity or more. On Prebos the LM-V3 landed and loaded directly. It shortened the operation considerably, being a day or so quicker than waiting for the container shuttles to complete so many round trips.
They wound their way clear of the tanker’s shuttles and came to a stop at the hangar’s rear bulkhead. The newly enclosed space was rapidly re-pressurized and, as everyone debussed, the cargo carts off-loaded what little luggage there was.
The interior of the V3 was a mix of green and yellow wall facings, red warning signs and blue flooring. There was no exposed metal. There was no flaking paint. For the most part, it was fines free, all clean and bright.
Now the interior space was breathable again, pressure doors opened automatically revealing well-lit corridors leading through the bulkhead to various parts of the ship. Scat guessed that they would not go very far. The cargo hangar on the other side of the bulkhead would take up the greater length of the ship, filled as it was with Amesont.
As Scat took in this new environment, the younger of his two guards tugged at his cuffs and guided him forward into one of the corridors. The other guard followed close behind. A few metres along they showed him into the cargo bay’s emergency medical station where a young medical assistant straightened his nose.
Scat stifled a yelp. The older guard smiled.
‘Quit the histrionics, Scat,’ the younger guard said.
‘Nasty mess we have here. Door or floor?’ the medic asked as he swabbed the burns on his neck.
‘Floor!’ Scat cried, straightening his back and pulling his head away from the pain.
‘Must have had some help on the way, Mr Scat. Low gravity impact isn’t usually so bloody,’ the medic replied, concentrating on Scat’s upper body looking for more injuries.
‘Aye. One of these goons lent a hand. Do I still have hair on the back of my head?’
The medic took a cursory look between swabs.
‘You do.’
‘That’s a relief, because these murdering farks fight like girls.’
It was Scat’s turn to smile, a broad smile with teeth showing, but to his surprise, his guards smiled along with him.
‘Better take a look at his teeth as well,’ the older guard suggested.
It was not long before the V3’s Commander announced the ship was preparing for take-off.
The guards walked Scat out of the medical station and into a large, low-lit forward-facing cabin that was lined with rows of launch seats facing a podium and a widescreen. It was noisy, already packed with Trevons. In the narrow aisles, a few of the crew walked up and down, checking their seat belts. The younger guard guided Scat to a seat along the back wall, sat him down and cut through his plasticuffs with a small box knife.
The older guard waited until Scat was comfortable, and then leaned over the back of the seat in front of him to speak quietly into his ear.
‘We’re not joining you, Scat, so don’t be a nuisance on your trip to Trevon. The Commander won’t be as gentle on you as we were. Don’t go overboard on the jokes, OK? He won’t understand your sense of humour. He might take it the wrong way.’
‘Fair enough, grunt,’ Scat replied, trying to sound cockier than he felt. ‘Do I slum in the brig, or with the rest of these guys?’
‘It's a tanker, Scat. There’s no brig. It’s a civilian vessel. The most they ever have on board are some company doorstops like us or a technical specialist with a day’s training on a stun. In any case, it’s a short journey. If you’re a bad-ass they’ll confine you to your cabin, on short rations most likely,’ he added good-naturedly. ‘Otherwise, there’s nowhere else for you to go. Have an accident-free trip.’
23
‘What do you mean by “the flight plan’s been rejected”?’ the V3 Commander asked.
‘As I said, Ferris, there’s an obstacle along first leg. The buoy network confirms it. You’re to use channel two to buoy station F4.’
Petroff rolled his eyes. He was only talking to Ferris because the StarGazer operator had patched him through without warning. The young lad was going to regret that later in the day.
On the face of it, they were doing the V3 a favour. They had checked the first few legs of the channel to see if it could slip past the first three buoy stations without running into nearby objects. It would shorten the trip.
A ship’s flux-drives disturbed space. They compressed the space ahead of a ship and expanded the space behind it. That caused gravitational ripples out front, like the bow wave ahead of an ocean liner, and churned the space out back, much like a ship's wake. That pushed and pulled at interstellar objects, disturbing their trajectory, making their movements unpredictable.
Hitting a speck of space dust at one or two light years per day would not lead to a bad-hair day; the plasma screens would simply burn them away, but anything the size of a small pebble would tear a hole through the length of the ship at an equivalent speed. Such an event was always catastrophic.
The solution had been an expensive one. The Inter-Space Regulatory Authority established the ftl Buoy Channel and Communications Network, a series of channels running up and down the routes to the New Worlds, much like two ladders lying side by side. One ladder ran away from Earth, the other ladder ran back to it, with ISRA and civilian shipping each using their own run.
Ftl buoys ran up and down all of them, stopping at each rung, or rendezvous station, where they played tag with the buoy already in place. That one then raced off further down the channel, leaving the newly arrived buoy to pass on its latest news, collect updates, and to confirm to waiting ships that the next stage of the journey was free and clear. Whenever the route was obstructed, the buoys adjusted the channel, automatically.
Only the Inter-Space Regulatory Authority, ISRA, and its Outer Rim Force enforcement arm could cross from one channel to another using the intersections. Civilian ships were barred from doing so. They were required to stay in the civilian shipping channels and to stop at every buoy station along the route to pick up their navigation updates.
It would remain this way until the Outer-Rim Near-Object Survey was completed and they could more accurately predict the effects of ftl on those objects. Or until the Inter-Space Regulatory Authority permitted the transfer of “off-channel”, military-grade StarGazer technology to the private sector. Which was unlikely. Unless your company was willing to short-cut things, as Petroff had tried to do.
‘Think of the upside:’ Petroff continued, ‘You can jump the entire channel, all the way to F4. The way is free and clear. It’ll shorten your journey by four hours.’
‘Understood, Petroff, but what is it, this obstacle?’
‘We can’t tell, Commander, but it’s well within the channel so we’re being careful.’
‘OK. So be it. But just to remind you, I don’t like the idea of ferrying these wayward cousins of yo
urs to Trevon. We’ll be invoicing Lynthax for the extra burn.’
Ferris signed off without waiting for Petroff to respond.
Good luck with that, Petroff thought.
Petroff pushed the mike away and looked for a source of coffee. He found it, filled a cup, gathered up his planner and then stopped briefly to gaze at another incoming neuralnet message from Williams.
‘We can’t confirm the nature of it, sir. And there’s no Earth-Standard electronic signature either. It appears inert. Smooth, not irregular in shape.’
‘Exactly how far out is it?’
‘Not far: three AU.’ Some 435 million kilometres.
‘And the V3?’
‘It won’t sense it. We can launch on your command once the V3 has jumped.’
‘I’m coming over. Fetch Xin. Conference in 15.’
As Petroff made his way across the station, the L-M V3 took off amid a violent storm of fines, thrusting its way slowly to the initial jump site some 5000 kilometres above Prebos.
Within minutes of it leaving the gravitational influence of Prebos, and as soon as the tanker had passed through its acceleration phase, the 100 metres diameter gravity ring powered-up, ready to begin its lazy rotation.
Free floating in the zero gravity, the passengers divided into two groups and air-swam their way down corridors on either side of the ship. Scat and the Trevons were led down a corridor marked “Accommodation”.
At the far end, there was a large spin-lock door. Opened into a space, no more than 20 metres across and maybe 15 metres long; an area that acted as both a reception and a sitting out area. On either side of reception, a line of accommodation units stretched around the ring in both directions. A narrow corridor on the near side of the ring followed the accommodation units around the ship. Interrupting its smooth lines were the occasional fire doors and a long line of handgrips that ran along the wall.
Like most of the LMs currently in service, the accommodation area was plainly decorated. This one was white, save for the scuff marks left by passengers who had pushed themselves off from walls and the ceiling whenever the ring was idle.